


you don't need poltergeists for sidekicks

by twnkwlf



Category: Buzzfeed Unsolved (Web Series)
Genre: Angst, Death, Europe, Friends to Lovers, Hand Jobs, Holding Hands, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2017-10-30
Packaged: 2019-01-26 15:26:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12560448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twnkwlf/pseuds/twnkwlf
Summary: “Hey Ryan,” Shane said, leaning in closer so that he could feel the warm breath from Ryan’s nostrils meeting his own. “Ghosts are real.”





	you don't need poltergeists for sidekicks

**Author's Note:**

> I just wanna apologize to Shane's grandmother, wherever she may be
> 
> Also the song title comes from Ghosting by Mother Mother

It was impossible to say that they were in the most haunted woods in the world because there was no way to prove that. Shane guessed that if you combed through the research enough, and tallied up some disturbances, then maybe you could come up with a point system, but that would be too much work for even someone like Ryan Bergara, who made a lot of lists as it was. You could never accurately and scientifically declare something as having the most ghosts.

So when Ryan said to the camera for the fourteenth time, “these are the most haunted woods in Germany,” Shane couldn’t help but speak his mind.  

“There’s no real way to quantify what the most haunted _anything_ is, though.”

“Uh, yes there fuckin’ is--- are you even looking at where you are right now?”

Shane was looking at his feet a lot because the ground was covered in dead orange leaves that hid all the bumps on the trail. He had yet to fully trip and eat shit on camera, and he didn’t want his good luck to end. They’d probably leave it in the final cut of the episode. Of course they would. But he did know where he was— the most haunted woods in Germany, apparently, if not the world. They’d been walking on this poorly marked trail for almost thirty minutes. He knew Ryan was trying his best to not think about The Blair Witch Project, which they had watched in the hotel room last night because, shockingly, Ryan _really liked_ to be scared.

“Realistically if a ghost has set up shop for the rest of eternity in one area, they aren’t just ghosting whenever living people are there. Who’s to say they don’t haunt the shit out of a place when no one’s around? Everything everywhere could be haunted.”

Ryan laughed, looking behind his shoulder while he stepped over a rotting branch. “Like, most ghosts are actually just really nice and considerate. They wait for you to go to work and then it’s just balls to the wall, blood dripping from the ceiling, rattling the dishes. But they’re like-- _oh shit, the Johnsons are home from their vacation. Everyone hide and shut the fuck up!”_

Shane thought immediately of his apartment back in LA. He pictured his grandma frozen still in his closet, ghostly green and translucent, giving him a sideways death glare whenever he ordered Postmates straight from bed or jacked off to Reddit porn late into the night. He entertained the idea that maybe she was haunting him, but would never let him know it. It wasn’t the greatest idea.

They bantered through the bit for a few minutes, a conversation that would inevitably turn into a blue and yellow text screen when they went to cut it. Shane faked a laugh as they continued towards the abandoned house they were going to be sleeping in tonight.

When they arrived, it started raining softly. It was a nice touch to the whole mise en scène. The structure was made of stone, which was mossy and covered in German graffiti. There were some German curse words he recognized and one large monstrosity painted in bright orange on the front near the door. Shane made a point to get a shot of it, so he could Google Translate it later.

Ryan puttered around, expressing his anxiety, squinting up at the overcast sky that was getting greyer and greyer as time went on. They held their GoPros aloft and set up the tripods, and adjusted the mics according to levels that the boom crew gave them. They’d been travelling with Mark and their usual team for the duration of this trip— a pilgrimage to a bunch of fucked up places in France, Germany, and Northern Ireland for the finale. But the crew stayed behind to sleep in the hotel tonight, which was fine, but made Ryan even more antsy. They’d left a satellite phone because the service was bad out here. Shane thought that was overkill. Ryan would have liked a flare gun as well.

“Shit, fuck, Jesus Christ, God!” Ryan yelled. They were startled while filming their tour of the main level. It was a mouse, but still had to catch his breath with one hand steadied on Shane’s shoulder. It was the pigeon in the Queen Mary all over again.

A little later they stood in empty room where a farmer had once been murdered, according to legend and rumor. They asked questions to no one in the dark. A creek croaked. The wind rustled the leaves around. The sound of a bottle rolling in the level below caused Ryan to look at him with that same mixture of hysteria and joy he always had in these places. Shane wanted to put his heart into it, say something worthy of memes, and Ryan, and his BuzzFeedBlue, but something held him back.  It would be one of those episodes where Ryan took the lead on things.

One thing he did say was: “Has it occurred to you that these ghosts might only speak German, Ryan?”

They took a break to eat trail mix and Cliff bars and Peperoni sticks by the light of a heavy-duty torch sat on the middle of the floor with the cameras off. They were gearing up to shoot the last bit in the basement of the house, which was obviously going to be the fucking creepiest. Ryan tried in vain to distract himself by talking about Oktoberfest, which they were going to take advantage of after wrapping up this weekend. He kept pausing mid-sentence and mid-chew to whip his head around and stare into the corners of the house.

“Oh, dude, dude, dude, dude—” Shane heard Ryan say through the door of the closet he’d shut him in in the basement. Shane would have to do the same after two minutes.

He could usually convince himself that a room was just a room, and the dark was just the dark, but then upon being alone with the GoPro in the closet, Shane felt a sense of dread hanging over him. It wasn’t unlike how he’d felt right before the funeral, when he knew he’d have to go and be sad with a bunch of cousins he never talked to, and he’d have to watch his mom cry again.

She’d died in her sleep. People kept mentioning it as if it was a piece of good news. Like _“it’s going to perfect weather for Labor Day, can you believe it? And your grandmother died in her sleep!”_

He thought about how people always said dead people looked like they were asleep. That was the biggest lie he’d ever been told. She’d looked like she was made of wax. He was in the pitch black of a closet in a basement of an abandoned house in the middle of the most haunted woods in the world and he was thinking about her body. He couldn’t think about dead farmers. He thought about how he’d cashed in his vacation hours to go to the funeral instead of reporting a family emergency to HR. He thought about how the funeral was only five days ago, and how his mom hadn’t texted him since he told her he was going to Europe for work instead of staying home with the family. He thought about the booze they’d packed in Ryan’s backpack upstairs.

He pushed his way out a minute early, startling Ryan again.

“Let’s drink,” he said, moving past him to get to the stairs.

“You were spooked!” Ryan stuck the GoPro out. Shane felt cheap. “I don’t fuckin’ believe it. You stood at the bottom of a literal Tuberculosis body shoot and NOTHING! But an empty closet and you bolt. What the fuck?”

Shane said nothing. Saying nothing might have ruined the moment for the episode, but Ryan surprised him by getting just as serious, shutting up and following him back up the stairs to the main level where the sleeping bags were set up. He tucked away the camera, as if for Shane’s sake.

They drank 3€  wine on top of their sleeping bags, straight from the bottle. They could have afforded something better with the expense account, but old habits die hard.

“Um,” Ryan started. “Were you really spooked?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“What did you hear?” He said it with a rapt fascination that Shane found equally parts annoying and incredible.

“Nothing. Mice.”

“Okay, you’ve told me on multiple occasions that if you ever saw a ghost you would come right out and say it and be like _you’re right, I’m wrong, you’re the best, I’m the worst.”_

“Stop feeling so vindicated— I didn’t see anything.”

Ryan shrugged and drank a long glug of wine, then stood up to start setting up the GoPros for their overnight footage. He watched Ryan change into his warmest clothes, long johns and wool socks and all. He could tell that Ryan wanted to know more, wanted to finally hear that Shane was believer, that he wasn’t alone in feeling absolute terror all the time in these places. He watched him pull his hood over his head and take his contacts out carefully, huddled over the light. Then Shane drank the rest of the wine, lying back and twisting his hands in knots under the sleeping bag. It would be the longest night.

When Ryan came to settle next to him, he buzzed with nervous energy. Shane felt shaken at the core, too. He could pass it off as being cold, but he was warm enough. After a few moments of lying there, Ryan started to bug him again.

“Are you still spooked?”

“I don’t know,” Shane said. He was going to cry. He already was.

“Are you okay?” Ryan’s voice was so quiet, as if he could ask without the mics picking it up.

Shane stared up at the cracked, broken ceiling and felt a few shitty tears slide down his temples and toward his ears. Ryan edged closer, propping himself up to look at Shane.

“Dude…” he started, but Shane interrupted him.

“I think we should get the fuck out of here.”

“Yeah,” he said immediately, “I’m cool with that.”

Ryan turned off the cameras. They would find a movie magic way to piece this episode together, probably, and Shane felt worse for being difficult, but he didn’t want to spend another second in a house where people went to marvel at death. He used to think he had a good handle of it—it was bodies decomposing, and missing another person’s presence, and nothing else. Knowing that made him strong, he thought. He blinked out a few more tears because he knew that next week Ryan would make him listen to an audio recording of an ambiguous whisper in the studio and tell him it was spirits, and he wouldn’t believe it. He would never believe it.  It was sadder now that someone he knew was a decomposing body that would probably never whisper again.

They packed their shit up silently and quickly, while Shane sniffled in the quiet. When they started to head out into the woods with their torches and phone flashlights blaring light in every direction they could manage, Shane told him that his grandmother died in her nursing home about a week and a half ago. It felt childish, somehow, to be crying about it. He was in his thirties. Burying your elders was supposed to be mundane.

Ryan didn’t say anything beyond the generic, sincere apology, which was fine. For two guys who spent a lot of time talking to dead people, they weren’t very good at talking about death.

The wooded path was even more difficult to navigate at night. They kept losing track of each other, too busy staring at the ground to make sure they weren’t going to fall, to make sure they were following the right color of trail markers. Ryan, at some point, took Shane’s arm and led them both in the same direction to avoid getting too far apart. Eventually that turned into Ryan leading him by the hand. Shane squeezed it tightly all the way to the car.

***

They spent the following day drinking beer at Oktoberfest, even though it was still raining, and they were both a little exhausted from the hiking. Shane was as present as he could possibly be for having cried in the woods the night before, but Ryan acted like nothing happened. It was probably a courtesy, but it made Shane feel like there was something on his face that everyone was ignoring.

They met up with two girls from BuzzFeed Berlin who brought Ryan a pair of Lederhosen shorts and an alpine hat. Ryan changed into them in a port-a-potty because he was day drunk, and then hopped up into Shane’s arms looking like a Keebler elf.

Someone took an Instagram shot of the moment, but Ryan stayed wrapped around Shane like a toddler for a few moments longer.

“Do you think you could carry me around like this for the rest of the day?”

Shane could, probably, for a little while longer at least. “How am I going to drink beer when both my hands are lifting you up by the tush?”

Ryan tried to cling onto him with his calf muscles hard enough that he wouldn’t slide down when Shane let go. It didn’t last long. He fell on his ass into a puddle.

“Alright, my small friend,” Shane said, grabbing him by both hands to pull him up from the ground. “Let’s get a schnitzel in you.”

Ryan squeezed his hand back, letting go only when Shane pulled away.

***

The Ireland episode went smoother than the German house— they were wandering around a castle. It was too novel for Shane to overanalyze this time. They got through it with the right amount of Ryan’s screams and inexplicable EVP noises for a finale episode. It was also a for-profit museum, so Shane didn’t let himself get too dragged into the mystery of death while surrounded by plaques, and red ropes, and tourism brochures.

They spent their last night in a pub, and got buzzed drinking bitter stout, talking about bullshit into the wee hours of the morning. They took a black cab to the Inn where they were staying. In the dark backseat of the car, Ryan put his hand on Shane’s. He could have moved it and pretended he was just going to adjust the seatbelt, but he just kept it there—the back of his knuckles on the back of Shane’s.

“Thanks for coming,” Ryan said quietly. The cab driver was too busy fiddling with the radio knobs to be listening to them. “Like, you could have stayed in Illinois, if you wanted. We wouldn’t have blamed you.”

“I know that.” Shane flipped his hand over gently, like he was dealing with a creature that spooked easily, which he was. Ryan squeezed it in response—he was braver than he ever let on.

 At the Inn, they got ready for bed without talking. Shane turned on the TV to infomercials while Ryan washed his face in the bathroom. Shane slipped on his glasses and sat in his pyjamas at the side of the bed. He turned the light out and stewed over the idea of sleeping in Ryan’s bed instead of his own. He watched half of an Irish commercial for an acne treatment product, and then breathlessly got up to move Ryan’s laptop onto the bedside table. He took its place and pretended to be relaxed and in control as he scanned through his Twitter feed.

When Ryan came back to the room, he didn’t even pause. He just yawned, drying his chest off with a hotel towel. When he finally made it over to the bed, he just got in, slipped under the covers, and asked Shane to turn the volume off on the TV.

The blue light was comforting and felt like a safety net for some reason. Shane carefully pulled on Ryan’s shoulder until he was rolling around, facing him instead of the weird folk art hanging on the wall.

“I want to reiterate that I was never spooked.”

“Okay,” Ryan said, amused.

“I was sad. It was a bummer of a place.”

“Yeah, it wasn’t Disneyworld, for sure.”

“But we can tell the viewers I was scared.” He would live to regret saying that, but for now it was a better alternative to the truth.

“Can you let me gloat?” He put his hand on Shane’s waist when he said this. “On camera?”

Shane chuckled. “You’re going to gloat even though it’s fake? Won’t that feel so cheap?”

“It’s the closest I’m ever gonna get to hearing you say the words _ghosts are real._ ”

“Hey Ryan,” Shane said, leaning in closer so that he could feel the warm breath from Ryan’s nostrils meeting his own. “Ghosts are real.”

Ryan threw his head back against the pillow. “I just got hard, oh my god.”

A week ago, Shane wouldn’t have thought twice about a comment like that. It was a little different now, and he didn’t want to question why, even though his brain quietly moved through all possibilities and explanations for what they were doing in the same bed, with their hands on each other like this.

While Ryan was moving his head back into place on the pillow, Shane shut his brain up and just rolled forward to kiss him. It seemed like the right thing to do, despite all logic telling him the opposite.

Ryan opened right up, which was unexpected. Not just his mouth. He felt his whole body go slack next to him. He kissed him with languid lips and ease like he’d been doing it for years, and Shane pulled on his torso to move him closer. Then it was like Ryan had died and been jumpstarted. He suddenly went tense and ripped his head away from Shane’s. He still held onto him like they were kissing, but he looked at the far wall.

“Fuck,” Ryan said.

“I’m sorry.”

“No…” Ryan squeezed Shane’s arms, tightened his legs that were tangled up with Shane’s. “It’s okay. It’s okay.”

Slowly and carefully, Ryan turned his head around and looked back at Shane, who had started to stare at the ceiling, and ask himself what the fuck he was doing with his life. Ryan began moving timid kisses up Shane’s neck. He was trembling a little. It reminded Shane of that first night in the Demon House, back in Season 1, when Ryan couldn’t even close his eyes. His eyes were closed now, though, and his hand crept up to Shane’s cheek, turning his head to face him. Whatever it was they were doing, whatever they were agreeing to, it went unspoken, like a love song cliché. Shane was okay with that. He just wanted to feel Ryan’s body on his own because it was real and alive and unambiguous in all the ways that counted. Ryan leaned in and kissed him hard, with teeth and feeling.

He put his hands on Ryan’s ass, while Ryan hitched a leg over his waist, and they were breathless, hissing, breathless when they started moving their hips. Ryan kept breathing fast, his vocal chords sometimes betraying him with a moan. Shane gasped few curse words, and got his hand on the edge of Ryan’s waist.

Ryan pulled his lips away, along with a string of spit that would have been gross if it hadn’t have been so fucking hot. He grabbed Shane’s hand and interlocked their fingers. He brought it down to his groin and both their hands started grasping at what was there.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Ryan muttered when they finally reached his cock.

Shane moved his hips into place so that Ryan could do the same to him.  They curled into each other on their sides, jerking each other off and kissing like inexperienced teenagers. Ryan’s nails dug deep into Shane’s arm, and Shane just placed a gentle kiss after gentle kiss on Ryan’s collarbone.

When Ryan came, Shane watched his eyelashes flutter and his mouth form a perfect _o._ Shane groaned into the pillow and came all over their hands and pyjamas.

It took them a while to get up and move, but they got rid of the rest of their clothes and Ryan got a damp cloth from the bathroom. It should have been awkward, or maybe even shameful, to clean themselves up, to look down at the tossed bed and think _what the fuck was that?_  

It felt complicated, but not awkward. Shane put on a new pair of boxers and climbed back into Ryan’s bed. They pressed their arms together.

“Madej,” Ryan started. “I’m really sorry about your grandma.”

Shane sighed. “Jesus, that wasn’t…I’m not just grieving and acting out, okay?”

“It just kind of came out of nowhere, though.”

Shane turned to look at Ryan’s shiny eyes reflecting TV light. “Did it?”

Ryan wouldn’t answer, that, but eventually he asked, “do you think she’d approve?” It sounded almost timid.

“Oh, fuck no.” Shane wound his arm around Ryan’s and grabbed his hand. Shane tried  to push away the thoughts that reminded him that his grandmother's opinion of things didn't really matter in the earthly world anymore. To someone like Ryan, they probably did. Ryan laid his head down on Shane’s shoulder, settling in for sleep.

They turned off the TV so that it was just the two of them, and the dark.

And whatever peaceful ghosts haunted the Inn where they slept.

**Author's Note:**

> u can follow me @ bellywasher.tumblr.com


End file.
